The premise of Positionly is this: search engine optimization (SEO) has become such an important component of the marketing strategy, that any marketing or business executive should have tools to understand the status and dynamics of its website positioning in Google and other search engines.

To do that Positionly created a simple cloud-based dashboard, which allows entering or uploading keywords and receive daily updates and ad-hoc reports about the website ranking in a number of search engines. The prices range from $19 to $99 per month and there is a free option for one website and 5 keywords.

During our market research efforts last year we have been contacted by the company called Link Assistant from Belarus. The company appears to also be going after the same large segment targeting anyone from a blogger to enterprise level clients such as Microsoft Germany or GE. So far Link Assistant has 380,000 users which it acquired purely through bootstrapped efforts.

Link Assistant is a desktop software, which is offered either free, or for Euro 100 or Euro 250 fixed license fee and something like $6.75 per month for regular updates. Desktop client works rather slow but it gives many more search engine position checks and unlimited keywords in the free version. The trick is that you can not save the results so there is no way to track the progress.

Positionly’s co-founder Grzegorz Kazulak has previously founded a software development company Alluniq, which specializes on Ruby on Rails. This is one more proof of how software development and outsourcing industry seed funds innovative efforts.

Positionly plans to spend the money raised to develop its product, user experience and performance andon its product roadmap is a service to teach its users to create web pages to improve search engine ranking. Until then, marketing.grader will have to do.

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Natasha Starkell

TwitterLinkedInFacebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.